Laravel relationship with pivot table

I have 3 tables in my database :

users (id);
interests (id);
users_interests (user_id, interests_id);

I want to be able to fetch all the user's interests in this way :

$interests = $user->interests

This is what I wrote in the User.php model, following laravel's doc:

public function interests() { 
    return $this->hasManyThrough(
         'App\Interest', 'App\UserInterest', 
         'user_id', 'id', 'interest_id'
    );
}

but it returns empty even though the user has a game. So there has to be something I'm doing wrong

Anyone to help me ?

via Chebli Mohamed